Alrighty, so first things first. The only hack I have done to my Wii U is install the Homebrew Channel using Smash Bros. I haven't done anything deeper than that as I am not ready to take any risks with it. Plus, I'm keeping the old soft-modded Wii around, so there's no need for me to risk bricking my Wii U.

I installed the HBC on the Wii U so I can access emulators and it has been great, but yesterday I decided to dive into N64 emulation for the first time and I put an app called Not64 on the HBC. I tried it out with a couple games, no issues. Then I tried Conker's Bad Fur Day, without knowing it wasn't compatible with the emulator and I was greeted by a black screen. I waited for a bit, then tried pushing buttons to get to the emulator's main menu. No dice. So I pushed the power button on the Wii Remote and the system shut off.

I didn't wait very long, maybe a full three seconds before turning the Wii U back on. I immediately went back to the Wii Menu to resume testing other games on the emulator. The Wii Menu loaded fine and as soon as I went to click on the Homebrew Channel icon, the screen went black and a message popped up saying "The system files are corrupted. Please refer to the Wii Operations Manual for help troubleshooting."

My heart dropped and I immediately thought I bricked the virtual Wii mode. I didn't understand how that was possible since I have never messed with any IOSes or did any hacks aside from installing the HBC. So I shut the system off again... waited a few seconds longer - pulled out the SD card and turned it on again. I loaded up the Wii menu, it was fine. I clicked on the HBC and it loaded fine. I then inserted the SD card and all of my icons popped up fine. I haven't had the issue again, even though the emulator has crashed on me again. I'm thinking I should stick to emulating N64 on the old Wii.

What I want to know is whether the Wii U was damaged in any way or was the "The system files are corrupted. Please refer to the Wii Operations Manual for help troubleshooting." the result of an issue with the SD card or some memory bug caused by the N64 emulator?

I noticed the emulator takes a long time to load roms and a message pops up that says it's doing a partial load on MEM2. I don't know what that means, but I'm hoping someone can explain and tell me everything's fine and it was just a fluke.

I put my SD card into the computer just now, it's an 8gb and pretty full. I ran a check disk scan on it and it said it found errors and corrected them. I also defragged it, scanned again and it was healthy.

This happened to mii on my wii. probly because homebrew channel was installed and forced shut down a wrong way. When i installed a wad into my wii it said the system data was corrupted so i deleted it and it started working fine.

Not64 now creates a page file in the NAND to load larger roms completely. I guess it doesn't work with vWii and caused an error. Nothing to do with your SD and it there doesn't seem to be any permanent damage. use an older version of Not64.

Not entirely related, but you should never, ever defrag flash memory such as an SD card. Solid state memory devices don't need to be defragged, and they have a limited number of read/write cycles in their lifetime; running a defrag needlessly wastes a LOT of those cycles.

Not entirely related, but you should never, ever defrag flash memory such as an SD card. Solid state memory devices don't need to be defragged, and they have a limited number of read/write cycles in their lifetime; running a defrag needlessly wastes a LOT of those cycles.

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Very true. On the other hand there is no harm done since SD cards are so damn cheap now.

Very true. On the other hand there is no harm done since SD cards are so damn cheap now.

Click to expand...

It's still a major bummer to have one crap out and lose data. Two days ago, in an again unrelated issue, one of my mom's dogs got one of my SD cards while I was at her house. About 20 gigs of ROMs, pictures, movies, etc, suddenly lost. Granted it wasn't because my card was at the end of its lifecycle, but a card can go downhill for any number of reasons just as quickly.

SD cards are for portable storage of COPIES of files, for us on small devices and stuff. They should not be your only copy. Everything you put on an SD card should also be put on a PC and maybe the cloud somewhere.